The Bridge Generation: Collective Biography by Queer Elders

• In Event: Writing Left: The Educational Potential of Literary and Artistic Practices for People on the Margins

Abstract

This paper offers a case study which engaged a writing collective of queer seniors the composition of collective biographies (Davies & Gannon, 2006). The research was guided by the following questions:

• To what degree might practices of collective biography alter the ways in which older people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) understand and represent their experiences of ageism, sexism and heterosexism?

• How might such collective biographies serve to create new publics and counterpublics?

Theoretical Context

Research has demonstrated that, despite shifts in societal awareness, sexist and heterosexist discourses still influence the ways that LGBT persons experience and represent their lives (Bryson & de Castell, 1993; Lather, 1997; Sumara, 2006). Various commentators (Dickson, 1999; Luce, 2000, 2004; Sumara et al., 2006, 2008; Woodbridge, 2008) have demonstrated the similarly negative effects of ageism.

Sumara’s (2002) and Rosenblatt’s (1978) research has found that when people learn to recognize the more subtle features and forms of literature and use these techniques as they write and critique their own work, their understandings become more situated and nuanced rather than prototypical or normative. In addition, Lodge (2002), Zunshine (2006), and Gallop (2000) have suggested that literary practices help us to become more critically aware of established personal identity narratives and to elaborate our understandings of the social constructions of normality and identity. Davies and Gannon (2006) have shown documentary materials that are collaboratively composed can be examined to recover an embodied sense of particular, located, and situated truths that have been forgotten or repressed. Finally, Cvetkovich (2003), Yachnin (2010), and Warner (2002) have emphasized the importance of literary representations to the creation of new cultures and publics.

Methodology, Analysis, and Findings
The Queer Imaging & Riting Kollective for Elders (Quirk-e) is an established arts-engaged collective of 25 self-identified LGBT individuals who meet weekly at a senior center in Vancouver’s Eastside. In this one year project, which I directed and facilitated, built upon Davies and Gannon’s (2006) model. Three groups first brainstormed issues, ideas, and historic moments that might focus investigation of their experiences as older GLBT individuals. Next, they developed writing prompts that they used to generate autobiographical writings and images. As moments of aporia, ambivalence, recognition, and resistance were identified and interrogated through peer critique, some narratives that were seen as ‘fixed’ become ‘unfixed.’ Work was extensively rewritten, culminating in collective biographies in which the voices of the various authors merged through negotiated collaborative revisions. One item of data is considered in this paper - The Bridge Generation - a movie in which the members of one group chronicled their decades-long journey from ‘no gay rights’ to ‘civil rights’. In the process of its composition, the group’s members re-examined cherished personal narratives and reconsidered issues such as the impact of gender on LGBT experience. The movie serves as an examinable archive of a key time in LGBT lives and, as such, has been and will be presented by the group at various events and conferences.

Author

• Claire Elizabeth Robson, The University of Calgary